When she got her turn, Katya found an email from her mother full of exclamation marks.
‘I’m safe,’ she wrote back. How much of a lie was acceptable? ‘Please don’t worry too much. The army’s doing everything they can, and everyone’s looking after me. You know how the news exaggerates. I love you. I’ll be home soon.’
She couldn’t help thinking about the promises her dad always gave when he left. She knew that’s what her mother would think of too. For the rest of the day, she tried to lose herself in any work she could find, ignoring the injuries she’d received the day before. Her ankle still hurt when she walked, and her lip still throbbed. The cut on her head had scabbed and stopped bleeding, but she could tell she would have a scar, just showing beneath the line of her fringe. They checked how much food they had in the museum: enough for a week or two. To pass the time, Katya spent hours in the basement storehouse, checking the catalogue of objects kept down there, filling in new entries for the recently excavated finds in their crates, still smelling of mud and loam.
On the fourth day, Katya and Salim watched the battle from the roof. Her ankle felt better now. She could walk without pain. There was a low percussion of thuds in the distance, artillery fire, marking time. Puffs of billowing grey kept cropping up like mushrooms among the buildings. Katya wondered if there were people still living there.
‘The generals are directing the fight from that hotel,’ Salim told her, pointing over the forest on the other bank, the ranging reed banks and the funfair in the distance. ‘The one by the river.’
Katya tried to shade herself from the sun that baked the roof, making the air hard to breathe. Dr Malik came around after lunch, and spent some time wringing his huge hands and talking with Salim on the rooftop. He was sweating, and his usual cheerful, booming voice had become a murmur.
‘The idiots,’ he said, as they watched the city being rocked by explosions, tremors they all felt in the earth. ‘The army’s killing people. Don’t they care? And they’re going to damage the bridges.’
A car alarm went off somewhere in the street below. When it stopped, a bird somewhere nearby picked up the same note. Towards evening, Salim took a call from the police chief, holed up in the hotel with the army command. Katya stretched her back against the parapet, and saw a woman in jeans and a flowered dress running down the museum approach. She could tell by the shape of her movements that it was Lola.
‘Oh. Salim, I have to …’ Katya started, but he was busy talking on the phone, and Dr Malik was too. Well, this was a crisis: she was as much in charge as anyone. She hurried downstairs as fast as her ankle would allow and opened the door. Lola’s face appeared in the crack, tear-stained and pale.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘They will kill me.’
Katya undid the bicycle lock and opened the door. Lola fell into her, shoulders racked with sobs. She was light as a bird.
‘It’s them,’ is all she kept saying. ‘It’s the ones who killed my brother.’
Katya locked and chained the door behind her.
‘It’s okay. It’s okay. You’re safe now. I won’t let anything happen to you.’
‘The city is falling,’ Lola said.
Katya put her arm around her and led her back through the museum.
‘The whole city can’t fall. The army’s here.’
‘No no no,’ Lola kept saying, disconsolate. ‘The city is falling. The army is leaving.’
Back on the roof, Salim was still talking on the phone. Katya looked for signs of trouble, any sign that what Lola said was true.
‘Lola, see that hotel? That’s where the generals are directing the battle. Salim’s talking to them right now.’
Lola just sobbed and hid her face. Katya watched birds flying in front of the distant hotel windows, the sun reflected in its glass. Salim’s voice rose and fell in concern. And then, all at once, every window in the hotel turned blank. Katya didn’t understand what she was seeing. A ring of smoke mushroomed around the hotel, swallowed it, and Katya felt her breath catch. An expanding orb of shock washed over the treetops, the reeds, the antennae on the roofs like a sudden gale. When it reached them, Katya heard the boom, then a crack like splitting stone. Smoke and flames rose to engulf the building, pieces of debris spinning high into the air. Behind her, Salim stopped what he was saying into the phone.
‘Hello?’ he said. ‘Hello?’ He turned around, his eyes wandering to Katya. ‘The line cut out.’
Then he saw Katya’s face, and her finger pointing off into the distance to where the mountain of smoke over the river was turning black, flames and sparks leaping as if the earth had cracked and something was clawing its way out.
‘The hotel,’ she said. ‘They blew up the hotel.’
Salim’s face was white. Already the gunfire was getting closer.
Aurya
When Aurya woke up, it was the pale blue of early morning on the riverbank. Dew had settled over everything, over her skin and hair, in the webs that spiders had spun between the sleeping soldiers. She could already smell the sun hitting the mud upwind, but it was a sharper scent this far down the river. She blinked awake and turned her head to where Sharo lay, but she saw with a start that his mat was empty. She jumped up and looked around. Everywhere she was surrounded by sleeping men, heads resting on shields, the snores mixed with the morning birds, the crickets, the river nearby. She saw the mud around Sharo’s sleeping mat was covered in drawings of lions. She scuffed them out with her foot so no one would see. Where was he? She looked off into the reeds that stretched out beyond the crumbling fort walls: nothing but birds taking flight in the morning, insects gathering in clouds. She spotted movement in the brush far outside the walls, but it was only a pair of deer nervous in the distance. Aurya looked back to the boat, and that was where she saw him. Sharo was standing up on deck with his back to her, beside the lion’s cage.
‘Shamash,’ she said and pulled her blanket around her, joints aching in the cold. ‘Smash his head.’
She picked her way through the sleeping bodies, past the silk tent with the peacock man inside and the boy Abil sleeping across the doorway like a dog.
‘Sharo,’ she hissed when she reached the gangplank, but he didn’t turn around. She climbed up the groaning boards tracked with muddy footprints, steadying herself with her hands.
‘Sharo!’ she tried again. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Look, Aurya,’ he said, and turned to her. ‘He’s going to lick my hand.’
Aurya saw that her brother’s arm was inside the lion’s cage, right up to his elbow. His fingers were stretched out. The animal, still wrapped in the ropes of its capture, was crouched. It was tense, its yellow eyes watching. Its tail flicked from side to side. The muscles in its hind legs twitched.
‘Sharo! Take your arm out of there! I’m not joking!’
Sharo flinched a little at her voice and frowned.
‘No, look, Aurya. It’s friendly.’
She took a step closer, and the deck creaked. The lion let out a low, gurgling growl. Aurya took another step. The lion raised to its haunches and shook its mane. Then she ran forwards. She threw all her weight against Sharo so he stumbled back and let out a cry of surprise, his arm sliding free of the cage. At the same moment, the lion leapt. Aurya whimpered as it struck the cage side, snarling. Its jaws wrapped around the bars, full of teeth as long as her fingers, yellow as old bone. Its throat smelled like the cart of a meat seller who can’t afford salt. The moment glazed, hard and polished as a stone, and then Aurya stumbled back, her heart in her throat. Her knees felt like reflections of knees in disturbed water. On the bank, men woke up everywhere at the lion’s roar, reaching for their weapons. Guards burst from the King’s tent, and shaved heads even emerged from below deck, accompanied by the rattling of chains.
‘You made it angry,’ Sharo said. ‘It was going to lick my hand.’
‘It … it wasn’t, Sharo. It was going to bite your hand and tear your arm off. What did I tell
you before? About hot soup?’
Sharo stuck out his jaw.
‘He thought you were trying to hurt me.’
The silk tent on the bank bucked and bulged, and then spat out the peacock man with his robes disarranged.
‘What’s going on?’ he shouted. His face blushed purple. ‘What do you think you’re doing up there? Sneaking around in the night like little thieves!’
‘The lion is my friend,’ Sharo shouted back to Aurya’s surprise. ‘His name is Enkidu. I don’t care what any of you say.’
Aurya stared at him, felt all the strength in her legs disappear. She sat down with a thump on the edge of the boat. The crowd of armed men and labourers all stared for a moment. Then they shook their heads and exchanged murmurs.
‘Grief does strange things to a person,’ the peacock man said as he tramped up the gangplank, wiping his brow with his cap. ‘But Shamash and Ashur, that boy is not normal.’
In its cage, the lion panted in huffs of steamy breath and circled, flicking its tail. Aurya listened to her own heartbeat still thudding like a fist on a door, and watched the men pack their things and undo the royal enclosure, their muddied hands moving without thought on the ropes and nails. One slave sang in his strange language as he worked.
Aurya watched the lion for some time, taking in the small scars that flecked its nose, its long curling tongue and whiskers that were shorter on one side. It looked back at her, and made a strange wheezy-whining sound as it did, followed by a huff of breath. She tried to see what Sharo saw in its eyes. She couldn’t: only a kind of bored hunger in those yellow bulbs, emptiness in the dark slits at their centre. They made her think only of tearing cloth, of blood and hands grasping at its mane.
She sat there for some time, unsure if she would be able to walk, and watched Sharo as he trudged to the other side of the boat to sulk. She thought of the expression on his face as he’d kept his hand inside that cage, his chin jutting slightly forwards. It was only when half the camp was cleared and the fires of morning had begun to burn that Aurya noticed something beside the lion’s cage. It was a pile of what looked like rice grains, in a brown patch on the deck’s wood. She peered closer, unsure what she was seeing. Some of the rice grains were moving, and she realised all at once that they were maggots. She looked into the cage at the lion’s foot, and saw that its wound had been cleaned. The fur around it was dark and matted. A pot of water sat nearby. She looked over at Sharo, who was hunched on the deck with his back to her, watching the birds gather in the morning sky.
The King came out of his tent a little later, when the last of the camp was packed. He looked tired, but nothing like the frightened, bleeding man she’d glimpsed the night before.
‘Fetch me beer, fetch me beer!’ he boomed. ‘The shapes in the oil are good this morning. Ashur is shining on this land and its King!’
Beneath the deck, slaves spat on their hands. Aurya now sat with Sharo among the cargo at the stern. She held on tight as each craft slid from the sandbar, and their waves rocked the fishing rafts and coracles of the early morning fishermen from villages nearby, the men swimming on inflated animal skins. She watched Sharo draw on the deck with his finger, making no mark but remembering the placement of each line, so that the picture emerged in his mind. She knew without looking that he would be drawing a lion.
Once the barges were back on the river and the peacock man had gone back to sleep, the boy Abil came and sat beside Aurya. He nodded to her, but didn’t say anything, just sat there and looked out at the landscape passing by, the little villages and groves, all the reed-lined inlets.
‘What did the King mean last night?’ Aurya said. ‘About his brother … about the gods and their statues?’
Abil looked over his shoulder before answering. He fixed her with a hard look.
‘Don’t speak about those things here,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t have heard them.’
‘I didn’t mean to hear,’ Aurya protested. ‘I just …’
‘There was a great war,’ Abil whispered. ‘Between the King and his brother. Over who would rule the world. The King’s brother is down there now, in the city of the dead. Or that’s what the histories say.’
Aurya looked out over the ploughlands with their villages nestled in watercress and reeds.
‘You know the histories?’
‘Yes, of course. From the tablet house.’
‘The tablet house … What does it feel like, when you look at the marks on the tablets, and you turn them into words?’
‘Reading? I don’t know … It’s like hearing a voice in your head. Sometimes the voice of someone who’s been dead for a long time.’
‘Like speaking to a ghost,’ Aurya said.
‘Yes. When you say a word, it lives for a moment and then it’s gone. But in the clay, it speaks for ever.’
Aurya nodded, not quite understanding. Abil looked at her, full of curiosity.
‘We’ll be in Nineveh by noon,’ he said. ‘How will you find your cousin when we get there?’
‘Nineveh,’ Aurya said, feeling the name run through her blood, full of every childhood dream. She looked at Abil, at his curly dark hair and innocent eyes, his young full face that had never known hunger. They were about the same age, she thought.
‘We don’t have a cousin in Nineveh. It was just something I made up.’
‘Oh.’ He bit his lower lip, his eyes wandering down to the deck. ‘What are you going to do when you get there?’
‘I’m going to find my mother. She was from the city once, and I think she might still be there.’
‘Finding one person in the whole of Nineveh could take a lifetime. Maybe your brother … if he really remembers everything, maybe he knows something that will help you find her.’
Aurya glanced at Sharo, still sulking nearby.
‘That’s the one thing he can’t remember. The day she died. Or the day she left. I don’t know which. But if the gods will it, anything can happen.’
‘I hope you find her,’ Abil said.
‘Have you ever heard of a place called the house of dust?’ Aurya asked. Abil licked his lips.
‘There are lots of names of places like that in the city: the house of women, the house of singers, the house of weapons. But I’ve never heard of that place.’
Soon he had to take water to the slaves below deck. Aurya sat alone and watched the dusty land pass by, the palms wearing their brown beards of dead leaves. She imagined what it would be like to live in every town they passed, to know that wall broken by the roots of an olive tree; to grow up in the shade of that palm and see those hills in the distance every day. There were so many people in the world, she thought. So many lives. More than she’d ever imagined.
She looked over at Sharo still brooding among the cargo, and saw that he was holding his head in his hands and covering his eyes. She went and put a hand on his shoulder. He’d scratched the image of a lion into the deck with a shard of pot.
‘Sharo, don’t do that.’ She looked around to see if anyone had seen.
‘There’s too much to see, Aurya,’ he mumbled. ‘You know how it hurts.’
‘I know. I always thought I could walk the whole length of the world in a couple of weeks, from the Bitter River and back. But look at it all … It would take months. Maybe years.’
Sharo clutched one hand to his skull, but went on scratching his drawing into the deck. It was very lifelike, Aurya thought. She could see his fingertips turning white as he gripped the potsherd.
‘The story,’ she said, and reached down to gently take the piece of clay from him. ‘You could tell me more of that story. Remember? Where were you?’
Sharo sniffed. But he nodded.
The demon Humbaba burst from the forest: the tearing claws of a lion, the fangs of a dragon, the tail of a serpent.
The King and the wild man fought, but neither could land a blow.
Around the clearing, the trees fell, and Humbaba screamed with rage and struck at them hard
er.
‘Shamash, great sun god,’ the King said, ‘please help us.’
Shamash answered. He brought the winds to fight the monster: the north wind and the south wind, the cold wind and the biting wind, the rain wind and the hill wind.
The winds held the monster down. They tied up his limbs.
All around the clearing, the cedars crashed down. And then the monster opened its mouth and begged for mercy.
‘Please, O King,’ it gurgled. ‘Take what you want from my forest. But let me live!’
‘I don’t think I like this story any more,’ Aurya said. ‘What kind of monster begs for mercy? Now I just feel sorry for it.’
Sharo put both his hands in his hair.
‘I always feel sorry for everyone in the stories. I want to warn them what’s coming.’
Aurya watched the birds circling over the boats, the high clouds.
‘Sharo, do you remember anything that might help us? Anything about this house of dust?’
His eyes wavered a little.
‘I don’t know.’
‘It must be in the great city,’ Aurya went on. ‘That’s what Abil told me. Don’t you think, Sharo? It sounds so grand. But if you could remember anything, Sharo. If anything came to you that might help us find it, you would tell me, wouldn’t you?’
Sharo shook his head.
‘Aurya. We’ll never find it.’
‘What? Sharo, what do you know?’
‘There’s no house of dust, Aurya,’ he said, and clutched at his head.
Aurya reached out and put her hand in his hair.
‘Sharo, please – if you know anything about what happened that day, you have to tell me.’
‘I can’t, Aurya.’
A shadow passed over them. Aurya turned to see the peacock man standing in the way of the sun.
‘You two,’ he said. ‘The King would like to speak with you.’
‘The King?’
‘Yes.’
Aurya looked at Sharo, and they both stood up. The peacock man led them to the prow and waited with the boat as they drew up alongside the royal barge, and men on either craft threw ropes to one another. Aurya couldn’t find any clues in the man’s face about what was going to happen. Then she realised with a cold certainty what it was: Nebo-Pishtim’s news had travelled downriver, fast as the summer insects. Aurya looked back at Sharo. She knew if he was asked, he wouldn’t be able to lie. Would he understand enough to keep quiet, at least?
All Our Broken Idols Page 14
